Lethal CRO Mistakes That You Need To Avoid

December 1, 2015

Lethal CRO Mistakes That You Need To AvoidBy Christopher Meloni

If you want to build a successful online business, then it is important to have Conversion Rate Optimization – CRO. With the help of CRO, you can bring down the cost of marketing and improve a site’s performance from content based sites, to SAAS, to ecommerce. When used properly, CRO can help you to benefit more or it can also effect you in the wrong way. CRO when poorly used not only wastes money and time, but also effects your business.

When it comes to testing and optimizing mistakes, they are very common. It can cause wastage of thousands of hours of time and millions of dollars of money. But once you understand how to use it, it becomes very easy to spot the problem and fix it.

Problem One: Focus On Conversion Rather Than On Experience

Most of the time marketers concentrate on a particular landing page and keep on optimizing its conversion without looking at the big picture. The process of optimizing a page for lead generation without thinking how those leads will help in the long run is the biggest mistake. You should stop considering all customers in the same way.

The true growth takes place only when the visitors are converted into customers by you. They should love your products and should come to a situation where they can’t do without it. For this, you need to bring the visitor on the site and make them familiar with the important components of the product. Such visitors will visit the site regularly and will buy the product. Such visitors turned into customers will become shocked once they find the product missing from the site.

Simply, an optimized page by itself will not give you a number of engaging users. On the other hand, you need to opt for the conversion rate optimization on the entire sales funnel. An unfocused optimization technique for getting visitors may not be good for business, even if it gains you superficial conversions. The only way to have proper growth is through applying correct CRO.

Solution

The foremost thing that you need to do is to look out for the steps which are slowing the visitors movements on the site. It is necessary to maintain only the important sections by removing the others. Check the sales funnel and see where visitors drop off from the site. Go for user surveys and heat maps to know about the troubled areas.

Problem Two: Always Thinking Small

Don’t go for the small things like button color change. The main issue with such an approach is that you can keep on testing small features again and again. By doing so you would have improved the quality of the page a little bit, but in the end, you have done nothing of much importance.

Solution

Instead of testing with the buttons and taglines, it is indeed good if you start testing the landing pages and look out for the user flows. Once you have tackled all the major issues, then you can look out for the minor ones.

Problem Three: Not Understanding Your Visitor Before Testing

Most of the time, the testing process is carried out by some random ways. At times it is carried out by some of the questions asked by the boss. In short, they are done without understanding the intention of the visitor for visiting the site. It is true that you may get some results from this method of testing, but most of the time you will get nothing. And it will lead you to frustration and improper data.

Solution

Before carrying out this kind of testing, try to know what your visitor wants to have by coming to your site. Look out for the exit rates and the bounce rates, which one has increased due to visitor confusion. Try to learn through surveys what was the result after your visitor visited the site. Now try to solve the issues based on this feedback.

If you want to grow from conversion rate optimization, you need to carry out testing based on the understanding of customers. Keep your goal intact when you are planning a build up of your own conversion rate optimization plan. Once the visitors are impressed by the experience they get on the site, then you will grow not just by optimization, but also by word of mouth.

Christopher Meloni is a Marketing Manager at Dealslands.co.uk a fastest growing online coupon industry. Apart from his profession, he also has a passion for the ecommerce industry and it’s branding and likes to explore new and innovative methods of marketing within his field.